HTML as a writting format
Just a off-the-cuff, minny discussion.
I use to consider HTML something that you'd use to write web pages, for the most part. Yeah, once in a while you'd use it for something that was displayed on a web page. Something like this, or other web based news groups I've been a part of. But lately I've come to realize that it is really a simple, yet formatted, way to write other mildly complex documents.
Since writting (probably can't tell from my spelling or grammer :-S), is part of my job, I end up writting a large number of documents. I use to write everything as a .doc file. As I became less of a designer, and more of a architect, i.e., keeper of the standards, release notes writter, generator of raw API documentation, etc., I was creating a large number of very small documents. As I started putting more and more of this information on the web, I started, of course, writting it all in HTML. This gradually migrated to the point where even medium size documents that I would normally generate as a .doc file, and then mail to someone, I'm now writting as HTML.
Using Netscape Composer, you can get some pretty simple formatting (but enough to do mildly complex things) and it is much more light-weight than say some word processor. Plus it is in TEXT so you rarely have corruption problems.
Anyway, whereas I use to write a majority of documents in a word processor outputting them as .doc files, I now primarly use HTML. In fact, I'm not sure of the last time I created a doc file.
Just a thought. :-)